Sunday, January 10, 2016

Brand New Year

Well I'm back to work on the game after taking a break for the Holidays. This week, I made a decision about which method of warping I wanted to use, fine-tuned that behavior, and implemented a slight tweak to an existing feature at the advice of a friend.

First, I decided that warping with a raycast oriented to the normal of the warp wall hit was the way to go. Last time, I detailed how I could either raycast backwards from the player, backwards from the surface of the wall we're warping through, or backwards from the player using a spherecast. They each had benefits and drawbacks, but if I raycast backwards from the wall I can actually make the player move in more interesting ways. Hopefully I'll have a new level or two by next week to show what I mean.

Warping in this way can cause the player to drift sideways slightly, so I needed to figure out a way to keep the player from moving too erratically in places where they're looping many times through two warp walls. In cases where the difference isn't too large, the warping will actually use a raycast backwards from the player - since that doesn't cause any drift. So I sort of hybridized the warping.

And finally, I used to have warp walls and bounce walls light up as you are charging forward, but a friend of mine pointed out that it makes so much more sense for this to happen when you're building up your charge attack (the double meaning of "charge" has been a headache on this project). Anyway, walls now change color when you're getting ready to charge, not while you're already charging.

And as always, the charge-up (see what I mean?) sound is a sound by Javier Zumer, used and modified by me under this license.